Objective:

To locate a responsible and highly visible leadership position that takes advantage of my mastery of designing, implementing, and managing corporate information systems and E-commerce infrastructure based on UNIX and Open Systems technology.

Recent Employment:

Minnesota Department Of Health:

Served as team lead for Web Services team within the Information Systems & Technology Management division. Responsible for the management, operations, and architecture of 34 UNIX servers hosting Internet and Intranet web sites for MDH, Public Health Laboratory, Infectious Disease Center, and Office Of Emergency Preparedness, plus approximately 100 Internet and Intranet applications running on Cold Fusion, Oracle Internet Application Server, and PERL. Responsibilities include management of the Oracle RDBMS systems that support these applications. Lead server consolidation project that reduced server count by 30%. 2.5 Years.

Best Buy Enterprise Services, Inc.:

Serve as Infrastructure, Operations, and Server Architect in the Information Systems group. Responsible for selecting technology and identification of configurations to support highly available E-commerce applications. Participate on the architecture teams to design new UNIX, ATG, and Oracle implementations of BestBuy.com and Musicland Group web sites. 1 year.

Best Buy Company, Inc.:

Served as a Technical Consultant to the Information Systems group. Responsible for selecting server hardware and software to support IS projects and ongoing operations. Key projects included designing server infrastructure for re-hosting BestBuy.com on HP/UX, re-hosting several Musicland Internet sites on Win2K, a new Content Management environment (mixed Win2K and UNIX), a UNIX-based credit card processing system, and UNIX-based order management system. 1 year.

BestBuy.com:

Served as Manager Of UNIX Engineering & Operations. Responsibility for all BestBuy.com UNIX services, including architecture, engineering, server operations, application support, storage management, data protection, business continuation, vendor management, and a relationship with an outsourced Internet Data Center. Sites under management by my team included BestBuy.com, SamGoody.com, Suncoast.com, OnCue.com, MediaPlay.com, Musicland.com. Managed a staff of 4 employees and 3 contractors. 1 year.

Nistevo.Com:

As Manager Of IT Services, I had end-to-end responsibility for all Nistevo IT Services, including help desk, system support, server operations, data protection, and business continuation. Managed a staff of 8 employees and 6 contractors. As Chief Enterprise Architect, I was responsible for the design of the Nistevo.Com development, test, and production environments, plus all internal support systems including the Nistevo Intranet. 9 months (dual role).

Consulting Projects:

Integrated Decisions And Systems, Inc.:

Served as Infrastructure Architect on a data center modernization project. Served as project manager for data center deployments. Served as project manager for roll-out of a revenue optimization and forecasting system for the parking ramps at Hethrow Airport.

Country Joe Homes:

Designed and installed a Microsoft-based back office system and Ethernet LAN to support the implementation of client-server project management and accounting system for a growing metro area builder. Also upgraded workstations, upgraded operating systems, installed an E-mail system, and a hardware-based Internet firewall. 2 months.

Transview Corporation:

Hired to stabilize a network and prepare it to grow from 30 users to 170 users. Purchased server-class NT servers, designed and implemented standard server and workstation images (based on NT 4.0 SPK 6a), implemented Raid-5 on servers, installed new E-mail system (based on MS Exchange), installed a development server with Visual Age, installed development and QA database servers, installed a 2.2-gigabyte/sec Fiber Optic network backbone, installed a production network segment with higher security levels. 2 months.

Federated Direct:

Served as a project manager for E-Commerce group. Rescued a stalled E-Commerce site installation. Designed and built a high-availability Sun Solaris server environment. Performed an audit on system monitoring to identify gaps, suggest point solutions, and recommend an enterprise-wide system monitoring framework. 4 months.

Fingerhut Companies:

Performed an operational review of the UNIX environment to identify shortcomings, risks, and areas of improvement. Served as a project manager for special projects, including an ERP installation, enterprise storage platform selection, 4th quarter capacity planning review, EMC Storage Server installation. 4 months.

American Express Technologies:

Served as UNIX Platform Manager. Responsible for 24x7 operations of 180 UNIX servers, including Sun Enterprise-class hardware and IBM SP2 frames. Responsibilities include strategic planning for UNIX, operations review, purchasing, audit support, priority management, UNIX engineering, setting architectural standards, and management of a large outsourcing vendor. 1 year.

American Express Financial Advisors:

Served on a project team to convert 200 AM/EX Financial Planners from Macintosh computers to a Windows-95 platform. These planners were located in Utah and New Jersey. All data needed to be migrated, both data local to the workstations as well as corporate data. The final migration was fine-tuned into an assembly line process to minimize the impact on the planners, and data was archived to CD-ROMs at various intervals to create an audit trail. 2 months.

Information Advantage:

Convert 1.4-million lines of C and C++ source code to allow IA's Decision Suite software to function in Internationalized environments. Follow-on projects included porting Decision Suite to run on DEC Alpha, Siemens Nixdorf, and Solaris on Intel servers, porting a C++ version of the product to run under DEC Alpha and IBM RS/6000 servers, development of a fast memory allocation procedure to dramatically improve performance, development of a stress testing suite, and development of a MIME-format translator. 15 months.

United Healthcare:

Senior Consultant on-site at United Healthcare's International Operations Division. Serve as Team Leader for the Configuration Management Team, an interdisciplinary group of department heads that manage configuration issues, schedule system usage, and resolve conflicts between project teams. Serve as Technical Lead on the Performance Enhancement Team, a group that was formed to re-architect UHC's Unity system to reduce average response time by a factor of 4. Serve as a Development Resource to build a distributed report generation and distribution system using Sybase RDBMS and Entera DCE software in C on an IBM RS/6000 platform. 7 months.

Information Advantage:

Senior Consultant on a project with Information Advantage to develop technology and build a software prototype of a product that enables IA's Decision Support Suite OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) Engine to be accessed from the World-Wide Web via a corporate Intranet or the Internet. The successful prototype was instrumental in allowing IA to complete agreements with key development partners and ultimately lead to several advanced orders before the final product was completed. 3 months.

American Express Technologies:

Serve as Technical Lead on a project at American Express to design a new electronic mail infrastructure. Performed extensive industry research using resources from the Gartner Group and Meta Group. Final design consisted of an X.400 backbone to connect key AM/EX sites, with distributed mail switches to interconnect various legacy E-mail systems such as cc:Mail, cc:Mail for OS/2, MS-Mail, MS-Mail for Macintosh, IBM PROFS, IBM OfficeVision, Lotus NotesMail, UNIX SMTP mail, Internet Mail, and Divinci Mail. All project communications and reports were completed using Method/1. 5 months.

Pillsbury / Grand Metropolitan:

Serve as Interim Director of Midrange Systems while Grand Metropolitan conducted a search for a permanent candidate. Position managed 6 FTEs and a $4-million budget. Responsible for distributed UNIX processing on a 24 by 7 basis for all Grand Metropolitan owned companies, including Pillsbury, Green Giant, Haagen Dazs, Alpo, Pearle Vision, Rudi Foods, Hublien, and Burger King. Platform consisted of 45 HP9000 servers running Oracle RDBMS, SAP R3, or one of several custom applications. 8 months.

ISSC, A Division of IBM:

Senior System Engineer on-site at American Express Financial Advisors. Managed AEFA's UNIX environment while ISSC conducted a search for permanent staff members. Developed and implemented routine system maintenance procedures, stabilized tape backup system, installed numerous hardware upgrades, managed projects to install several new UNIX systems, developed and managed a project to bring consistency to the 42 existing Sun Sparc servers. 5 months.

IDS Financial Services:

UNIX Engineer on-site at IDS to support a major corporate re-engineering project. Perform R&D evaluations on UNIX server technology and infrastructure products. Selected final UNIX software configurations. Built and deployed pilot UNIX servers. Developed processes, documentation, and training for field server roll-out to allow the tasks to be completed by staff with no special UNIX skills. Support client-server technology development group. Worked with DBA group to stress test and roll-out production instances of an in-house developed middleware product. 9 months.

Past Employment:

Solid Logic Computer Solutions:

Senior Consultant responsible for successful completion of all UNIX and Network related projects. These responsibilities include performing initial site inspections, writing proposals, supporting sales staff, selecting team members, recruiting, project and system design, supervising development, system integration tasks, writing and editing system documentation, and participating in acceptance activities. 2 years.

Information Advantage, Inc.:

Principal Software Engineer specializing in creating end-user development tools, mathematical software, and multi-platform network applications. Responsible for configuration, release, and distribution of IAI end-user tools. Coordinated documentation, field installation, and technical support for all IAI software products. Development environments included UNIX, DOS, Macintosh, and OS/2 using languages such as C, C++, BASIC, FORTRAN, SQL, and Assembler.

Computer Systems Manager responsible for all IAI computing, networking, and telecommunications facilities including the training and supervision of system support staff members. These responsibilities encompass planning, purchasing, operations, and maintenance of equipment ranging from workstations to minicomputers such as PS/2, Macintosh, VAX, RS/6000, Sun, and dedicated database processors. These machines use operating systems such as UNIX, VMS, DOS, OS/2, Novell, and IBM DIS and are configured into 10 local area networks connected by an international wide area network. 3 years.

Metaphor Computer Systems, A Division of IBM:

Software Engineer with the Metaphor Consulting Group. Design, prototype, and implement graphical workstation tools in Metaphor’s Data Interpretation System environment. Served as Product Manager for Metaphor’s statistical toolkits and Project Manager for several development projects. Created technical documentation for and supervised technical support of all tools created by the MCG. Worked on project team to port Metaphor software to OS/2 following the IBM buy-out. 2 years.

Police Department, City of Madison, Wisconsin:

Operate the service facility supporting emergency communications equipment installed in 900 vehicles for 40 Madison, WI, and Dane County area municipalities. Duties include scheduling, billing, inventory, purchasing, supervision, maintaining detailed service records, and customer relations, as well as a portion of the installation and maintenance workload. 2 years.

General Electric:

Lead Communication Technician at a General Electric Land Mobile Radio service facility. Responsible for the installation and maintenance of two-way radio equipment for 500 customers in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Also worked with the sales staff to engineer custom equipment modifications to accommodate special client needs. 3 years.

Industry Awards:

Software products that have been designed, prototyped, and/or developed by John Weeks have won the following prestigious industry awards:

• The Meta Group, Excellence In Business Information
• Retail Network Innovation Award
• Data Warehousing Institute, Product Of The Year
• Crossroads A List
• Realware Awards, Product Of The Year
• Upside Magazine, Product Of The Year

Professional Recognition:

• Information Advantage, Employee Of The Year, 1992
• Solid Logic Computer Solutions, Franklin Award, 1st Quarter 1995.
• BestBuy.com, Employee Of The Month, March 2001
• BestBuy.com, Employee Of The Month, June 2001
• BestBuy.com, Employee Of The Month, August 2001
• BestBuy.com, Employee Of The Month, October 2001
• Best Buy Company, Inc, IT Employee Of The Month, January 2002

Professional Qualifications:

• B.S. Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Certified Electronics Technician (APCO, NABER)
• F.C.C. Licensed Broadcast Engineer
• ITAN Certified Travel Agent
• 24 Years of Industry Experience
• Masters Certificate in Peak Performance Psychology

Education:

• University Of Wisconsin:
  • G.P.A.: 3.97
  • Associate of Science Degree, Electrical Engineering
  • Departmental Distinction Award, Computer Science
  • John S. Newbury Award for Creativity
  • Extension course in Video Production at WHA-TV

• University Of Minnesota:
  • G.P.A.: 3.96
  • Graduated Summa Cum Laude
  • Bachelor of Science Degree, Numerical And Computational Mathematics
  • BS Minor in Computer Science
  • Significant course work in Computer Engineering
  • Significant course work in Business Administration
  • Computer Science Honors Program
  • Deans List for Academic Excellence
  • Minnesota Society of Professional Engineers Scholarship
  • Computer Science Honors Project Summer Stipend Award

Significant Projects:

AT&T GIS/MSL Project

Design of a network reorganization plan for AT&T Global Information Systems. The network reorganization required splitting a series of manufacturing plants into two separate LANs that were fully isolated from each other, including services that existed on the original LAN (file servers, print servers, FAX server, E-mail system, Internet gateway). We pilot tested the network design by retrofitting a 350-employee manufacturing plant running on a 24 by 7 schedule. The implementation required less than 8 hours of downtime, and critical processes were interrupted less than 30 minutes, despite having to reprogram routers and change all IP addresses.

Chiron Image Migration Project

Chiron Corporation, an Oakland-based drug company, used an outside service bureau to process and store a library of R&D notes in a document imaging system. This imaging system was based on FileNet OSAR hardware (Optical Storage and Retrieval) and a Verity text search engine with images and text records cross-indexed in an Oracle database. Chiron then decided to migrate the imaging system in-house system. Unfortunately, these software vendors did not have procedures to perform a migration from system to system. To complicate the process, FileNet images are assigned a unique image ID number when they are loaded into the OSAR system. The solution was to write a series of utility programs to extract the data, load it into the new systems, edit the text database to update the image ID numbers, and re-index the databases.

Cigna Legal On-Line Library Project

Participated in a project team to develop and deploy a document imaging and text search system for the Legal Dept. of Cigna Insurance. This system allows Cigna retained law firms to access a document library stored in Philadelphia through a wide-area network dial-on-demand connection implemented on basic and primary rate ISDN. My involvement included resolving technical issues between vendors, troubleshooting technical problems, reconfiguration of network infrastructure to optimize throughput, installation of pilot sites in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington DC, and development of an installer to allow non-technical users to set up new workstations.

Coca-Cola QAC Project

Participated in a project team that designed and implemented a computer system to automate the processing of consumer survey data at the Coca-Cola Corporation. This project involved integrating mainframe data servers with graphical display terminals and remote data collection machines using a wide area network along with the development of numerous system level and application level computer programs.

Hibbing Electronics Plant Automation Project

Hibbing Electronics is a large printed-circuit board manufacturing company. While they have purchased state-of-the-art assembly, packaging, and test equipment, Hibbing Electronics had no computer systems in house at the start of this project. The goals were to set up LANs for HR, Accounting, Front Office, and Engineering; provide an easy method to exchange files with customers; and prepare the company for the installation of a future document imaging system. To meet these goals, I designed a 10BaseT Ethernet network that had a twisted pair hub in each building, and a fiber-optic backbone to connect each of the 4 buildings in a star configuration. A central computer room was constructed. This area housed Novell Netware servers for each department, SCO UNIX servers for engineering, and a Sun SparcServer used as an Internet gateway, web server, firewall, FTP host, and E-mail server.

Holiday Horizon Project

Design of a vehicle anti-collision safety system that was installed on the Holiday Horizon roller coaster in the General Electric Pavilion at Disneys Epcot Center. System used Hall-effect devices to sense the rotation of the wheels on the cars, and a UHF radio link to transmit the pulses back to a central receiver station. The central receiver employed a missing pulse detector. If a car stopped, it would fail to send a pulse, which the central station would detect, which would activate an emergency shutdown to avoid other cars from crashing into the stalled car.